Art and Design
How & How takes a smart, bright collage-based approach to overhauling Bristol Dockyards
For those outside of Bristol, it’s all too easy to assume that the city is merely a place where Triphop and Dubstep were born; a Mecca for trustafarian types on a perennial ‘gap yahhh’ wearing those trousers that make people look as if they’ve had some sort of toilet issue; a place where the streets are paved with ketamine and...
Who knew a spiral could do so much? Pentagram did, in this joyful Tokyo museum identity
The Museum of Narratives (also known as MoN Takanawa) is located in Tokyo’s Takanawa Gateway City, and opened a couple of months ago in March 2026. It’s something of an experimental museum with a cross-disciplinary programme spanning visual art, installations, and performances themed around everything from society to art to science, manga, and anime; merging traditional Japanese culture with hyper-modern,...
Koto breathes new life into Floridian arts institution The Norton
The Norton Museum of Art began life in 1941 in West Palm Beach, Florida, and in the near-century since, its whole raison d’être has been based around its role as a place where “art and life meet as a part of everyday art”. As such, it acts as more than a look-don’t-touch-style gallery space: the garden, gallery and restaurant are...
OlssønBarbieri rewrites the rulebook on ‘formality’ in its melodrama-infused Theaterbaren identity
Oslo’s Nationaltheatret (simply translated to English as National Theatre) first opened its doors more than a century ago in 1899, and has since come to not only reflect, but actively shape cultural identity in Norway. Having staged everything from more traditional Norwegian dramas from the likes of Henrik Ibsen to experimental contemporary works, the building itself is also a marriage...
NoomaLooma by Cotton
NoomaLooma is described as a “platform built around small moments of making”. As far as I can tell, it’s an app in its early stages (at the moment, it’s just for iPhone), and it’s launched with a brand identity created by New York studio Cotton (the design team behind the excellent identity for Eternal Research). The platform was created by...
Off-kilter and elevated
St Paul’s Cathedral is undoubtedly one of the most iconic, recognisable landmarks of London’s skyline: its vast dome, all beautiful copper-tarnished turquoise, resplendent with dazzlingly golden pineapples (one of its architect Sir Christopher Wren’s favourite accoutrements, and back in the 17th century a distinct status symbol representing all that was bountiful and exotic). Until 1963, St Paul’s was the tallest...
Gloopy, bubbly, occasionally borderline illegible
It’s always confusing, surprising and slightly disappointing when you come across art or design-focused brands, agencies, platforms, publications or organisations that seem to have a total disregard for what they look like – as though their own central premise and raison d’etre is at odds with their look and feel. I won’t name names, because that feels both mean and...
HotDog by SMLXL
From the moment I turned the sound up (as per instructions) on the ‘about’ page of the HotDog website, safe to say I was obsessed with this brand and its branding. It’s laugh out loud hilarious – I truly loled, as did the person I was sharing a room with, and as I’m sure anyone within eye- or ear-shot would...
Kanal by Base Design
Kanal is a museum-to-be with an admirable yet bold raison d’être that defies much of what we think we know about the nature of highbrow cultural sites: not a “finished institution, but a cultural project in motion,” as its general director Yves Goldstein puts it. Based in Brussels, Kanal will – somewhat surprisingly – become the city’s only museum of...
Kunsthalle Basel by Porto Rocha
Basel is a fascinating place – beautiful but unassuming, relatively small but the undisputed capital of the contemporary art world. Not only is it the host of – as you’d guess from the name – Art Basel, the Art Fair that arguably forms the pinnacle of the global art market calendar, but it also has one of the highest densities...
The Huntington by Base Design
There’s a particular kind of challenge that crops up again and again in cultural branding – not obscurity exactly, but partial recognition. The sort where an institution is famous for one thing, quietly exceptional at several others, and yet rarely understood as a coherent whole. The Huntington, a century-old cultural and research institution in Southern California, sits squarely in that...
Eternal Research by Cotton
Niche/difficult electronic music types and brand design nerds are rarely found too far from one another; often, indeed, they’re one in the same. It’s little surprise really when you look at the typographic wonders to be found across the spectrum of things like vintage synthesisers – the sublime curves of ‘Omnichord’ or the strangely pagan-ish letterforms on a Prophet-5, to...